Speaker 2: 0:01

Hi I'm Alexa and I'm Rory, and together we are.

Speaker 1: 0:09

The. ROAMies. We are married To each other. Right, we are a touring musical duo. And our music has taken us to all kinds of places all around the world and keeps us always on the go.

Speaker 2: 0:21

So we hope you enjoy our stories and adventures while running around working to keep all your plates spinning.

Speaker 1: 0:27

And, we hope, to facilitate your busy lifestyle and feed your inner travel bug, mm-hmm. We want to thank FIRMOO for supporting this episode. They provide really cool, very affordable glasses, sunglasses, whatever you need. You can go to our show notes and get a discount with our link so you can catch great sights and views wherever you roam. All right, y'all. Here is our interview. Hi everyone, we are super excited to have Pauline Frommer today on our episode. Oh, yeah. She is a very honored guest.

Speaker 3: 1:08

I've been following the family since I started traveling.

Speaker 1: 1:10

Yeah, yeah, we are super honored to have Pauline with us today. I've been able to meet Pauline several times through the travel and adventure shows that are put on by the travel and adventure show.

Speaker 4: 1:25

Yeah, they're run by a company called Unicom. Thank you, unicom.

Speaker 3: 1:29

That are put on by the Travel and Adventure Show. Actually, they're run by a company called Unicom. Thank you, unicom. There you go, she's a travel expert.

Speaker 1: 1:34

That's why she's falling for it. Exactly, we've been enjoying like checking those out, and, just as we meet different people or find out different things, we love utilizing the resources and information we get from those to share with you. So that's one of the ways we love passing on some information to you, or how we get some of the info that we pass on to you guys. Because Pauline is so widely versed in travel, we could talk for hours about anything travel related and beyond, because she's just super fun to talk to. We want to kind of narrow down a couple things, and so one of the things that Pauline has recently run across some new changes to travel in America right now. So let's dive in, because we Rory and I are currently in Switzerland as we are recording this and so we are avoiding all the American summer heat. That's going on right now.

Speaker 3: 2:23

Yeah, we were in Finland before this, so we're really bored yeah.

Speaker 1: 2:28

Nice, yeah. So, pauline, before you dive in, you can just tell us a little bit about Fromerscom, and then we can dive into America.

Speaker 4: 2:36

Yeah, Well, we are a family-owned business. My father, arthur Fromer, founded the guides in 1957. He was actually drafted into the army to fight in the Korean War but because he was the son of immigrants and spoke German and Russian, he got sent to Europe instead. He started traveling all around and it was right after World War II. So all of his fellow GIs stayed on the base. Europe was in rubble. They were worried they wouldn't be able to travel well if they didn't have much money which they didn't have and he would come back to the base.

Speaker 4: 3:18

People would pepper him with questions and he thought maybe I'll write a little book. And he'd never written a book. But he wrote a little book called the GI's Guide to Europe. It became a bestseller in the army and then when he got out, he thought maybe I'll do this for civilians $5 a day which was the best-selling guidebook of all time and launched the Fromer Guidebook series. We are a family-owned company. We've sold 75 million guidebooks over the years. We're also run fromerscom. I was the original editor of fromerscom and we were one of the first travel sites on the web. Now we get about 4 million users per month and we're still trying to be journalists, so nobody pays for me to say anything. So anything I say today is what I really think. Nobody is paying me to say these things.

Speaker 1: 4:22

That's awesome. Yes, well, we appreciate your opinion and your insights and expertise.

Speaker 3: 4:27

What a great history.

Speaker 4: 4:29

That is really cool. Uncle Sam changed his life in an incredible way. Who knew being drafted would be the best thing that could happen to him?

Speaker 1: 4:38

Well, speaking of America. Well, it's been a very interesting time.

Speaker 4: 4:44

For decades, people have been complaining about the crazy fees that the airlines are charging and about the fact that it's really hard to know what the rules are governing delays, cancellations and all the rest delays, cancellations and all the rest. Just this past May a new federal. They just reauthorized the FAA's platform, the Federal Aviation Authority, and in that reauthorization were all kinds of great things for consumers. So first of all, you now have what they call. What do they call it? You can go to the FAA site or the Department of Transportation site and you can easily see what your rights are as a traveler, and this is something that is very new. It used to be that you would have to dig through the small print for each individual airline, but now there are overarching rules that apply to all of them that you can find out pretty easily. I don't know you're abroad so you may not have heard.

Speaker 4: 6:00

A couple of weeks ago, there was this terrible meltdown of travel because of a Microsoft problem and people were stranded all over the country, mostly because of Delta's inability to come back for it quickly. Delta really had the biggest meltdown and Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, was tweeting very publicly you have tickets. They're supposed to be putting you up in hotels. You have these rights. And then, just a couple of days ago, an even bigger. Well, that was big, but this really is close to my heart because for a long time, because of airline fees, families often have not been able to sit together. On average, for a family to pay extra to choose to sit together, it's $200 round trip, and that's too much for many families to afford.

Speaker 4: 7:19

Breaking up families is a safety issue. Imagine if there was an emergency landing. How would a mother get off that plane if her child was many rows away and she didn't know what was happening with the child? So just this week it was announced that airlines will no longer be allowed to break up families, that they cannot charge them to choose those seats and that if there aren't seats together and they're defining families pretty broadly they're basically saying if there's a child under 13 and an adult is traveling with that child, these rules apply. Whether it's an aunt, a grandparent, a friend, whatever, they will no longer have to travel alone.

Speaker 4: 8:07

Now the airlines are fighting this. It's in the courts now, but it looks like this is going to get through and I'm so glad, because it was so ridiculous to be dividing families in this way. It just doesn't make sense. So that's about to end, and it's interesting you know that this has gone on for so long under Democratic administrations, under Republican ones. So I give a lot of credit to Pete Buttigieg. I think he's been a really smart Department of Transportation secretary, one who's been proactive about getting these things changed proactive about getting these, these things changed.

Speaker 4: 8:47

Yeah, I mean, it's not something people think about every day, that's for sure. You only think about it when it happens to you. When you're, you're either asked to move so that a parent can sit with a child, which is also annoying, or you're separated from your own child.

Speaker 1: 8:59

Yeah, exactly, right, right, I'll just dive in here real quick, if you are. If you guys are listening, we are recording this in 2024. So, depending on when you are listening to this episode, we are in 2024 right now. We're recording this in August of 2024. So, even when you listen down the road, things may be may get better. Yeah, yeah, maybe totally different, and we're gonna put the FAA site that you mentioned. We'll put that in the show notes, uh, so that it may be DOT it may be the DOT site, okay we'll get that and put that in, okay, anyway.

Speaker 1: 9:37

So back to back to our regular schedule program.

Speaker 3: 9:40

Yeah that's good, that's that's all great news. Really good, really really good stuff.

Speaker 4: 9:44

It's going to change travel. I think it'll make the United States more like Europe. European travelers have had these rights for quite some time. We're finally catching up, gotcha.

Speaker 1: 9:58

Any other updates on the US side that you can think of at the moment? I think those are the big ones, yeah.

Speaker 3: 10:06

All right, yeah, we were lucky enough to miss the big meltdown.

Speaker 1: 10:10

Yes.

Speaker 3: 10:11

What happened with the crowd strike? I think it was when their security had all dropped with all this stuff. We we were in got to Finland just before all that happened, wow.

Speaker 4: 10:21

Yeah, yeah. It's been interesting to see how these systems that make life so easy also, when they go awry, things just stop. Yes totally.

Speaker 1: 10:32

Well, speaking of systems, I do want to say it's been late on our trip over. I think we did have to take off our shoes, but we got to leave all the liquids in the bag, all the computers in the bags. So many more security systems around the US even are allowing you to be, because you had mentioned like comparing it to Europe A lot of times. In Europe we have not had to take out our liquids and take out our computer. You just throw your bag in and walk through, and security was so much easier on this trip over from the US to Europe. On the US side, you know everybody's just kind of upgrading their security machines and even that's been a fun adjustment. You know it's like much less hassle.

Speaker 3: 11:17

Yeah, that's great. Yeah, a really cool thing that we found out is a bottle of water went through security and when it got to the other end, they pulled out of the bag and they said do you mind if we put it through our analyzer? They took the bottle and put it in a machine, analyzed it and said it's okay, you can go yeah, I was.

Speaker 1: 11:34

I was standing um, I was standing outside of security finishing my water right, because you always have to drink your water before you go through security and one of the security ladies saw me. She said you can take your drink through. I was like, really okay, so I just screwed it on and and whatever water was left in my water bottle went right through and they and uh, so which?

Speaker 4: 11:55

is how hard is this? Hell sink yvanta. Wow, I haven't come across that before. That's great, great news.

Speaker 3: 12:03

Yeah, isn't that amazing. It's really cool. They analyze it now. I thought that's helpful for us. It still slows you down because they have to take it and analyze it, but you don't have to pour your water out anymore and waste all your money.

Speaker 4: 12:16

Right, right, that's great.

Speaker 3: 12:18

Yeah, I liked it.

Speaker 1: 12:21

All right, let's move on. Let's shift gears a little bit. I would love to hear your advice on creating a smart itinerary. Usually when Rory and I travel because we're traveling for our music and all we kind of just have to go where the gigs are and you know that kind of thing. But most people can plan like a normal kind of trip. So what would be your tips on creating a smart itinerary?

Speaker 4: 12:49

Well, it's something that we have our guidebook writers do. Every one of the Frommer guides has a chapter where we give sample itineraries, and I find it to be the hardest chapter for even professional travel writers to get right, because they always want to cram as much into it as possible. And so I've come to a formula for this, and I wrote about this for Fromerscom. I think you never should do more than one museum a day, unless it's a very small museum, and then you want to have something that's very different in the afternoon, so you want to look at the geography of a place, so you're not spending all your time getting from place to place, and then you want to create days in the destination where you have a lot of variety.

Speaker 4: 13:49

I once heard that there were some people who were looking at the itineraries put out by guided tour companies and following those, and that's the worst thing you can do, because often those tour itineraries are set because of local work rules. So, for example, I once led a tour in France. We got to see and do very few things in France because our bus driver could only travel for several hours a day and we often had to go to the places that were big enough for the bus to park, and so you don't want to be using guided tour itineraries, because often these types of elements that have nothing to do with travel have to do with how they do the itinerary. So I say you know, you do you look at the weather nowadays, sadly, because we we have, you know, with in this time of climate change, it can get beastly hot in the afternoons.

Speaker 4: 14:54

So often I'll say you know, do your indoor things in the afternoons, do do one site or activity. That's about the the. Well, it depends on where you're going. But if you're in a city that informs you about the life and culture and history of the city, so that's half the day. Or if they have a great museum that is great for art, then you do that for half the day and then the second part of the day. You don't want to do things that only have to do with what I call dead sites. Too often we go to a destination and we only look at the history, and it's so exciting to me just to stroll through a grocery store or the neighborhood where the real people live. So you want to schedule time to engage with the living culture as well as the historic culture, and I always try and give myself an hour where I turn off my cell phone and I just let myself get lost, because you find the best things when you don't know where you're going.

Speaker 1: 16:08

And.

Speaker 4: 16:09

I think that's a way to wrap your mind around creating an itinerary.

Speaker 3: 16:15

Yeah, that's a great. Oh, we love getting lost.

Speaker 1: 16:18

We love getting lost.

Speaker 3: 16:19

We purpose just to get lost, sometimes because you discover such amazing things, yeah, absolutely. And when you have to ask for directions, because you discover such amazing things.

Speaker 4: 16:25

Yeah, absolutely, and when you have to ask for directions, you get to talk to locals. It's a great. You know reason to talk and I find that the best the memories I have of my travels. Yes, sometimes it's being at the top of the Eiffel Tower or being in the extraordinary museums of Austria, as I was last summer seeing a Klimt face-to-face, and those are rapturous paintings but mostly what I remember are the people I meet, and so it's a great way to have an excuse to talk to people. Yeah, we got it.

Speaker 1: 16:59

One of the things that we're on the baby steps and starting to do. I've been recording my walks because I love to walk. That's just a passion of mine. So as I go on a new hike or something, I've gotten in the habit now of starting to record them, because usually I'll find something super fun or super interesting or just really super pretty. This happened just two nights ago. I just went ahead and started my walk in Switzerland. We have been indoors rehearsing like all week. So I got out and I was like I'm taking a walk. So I started walking and our friend had texted us and said hey, this is Switzerland's birthday, so if you hear fireworks, you know you might hear some noise tonight.

Speaker 3: 17:43

They're shooting muskets in the backyard, and so we thought, okay, uh, something's going on during the day.

Speaker 1: 17:49

yeah, but I had forgotten about that when I was on my walk, until I started to hear music and I I had started up this path into the wilderness and I was, I started hearing the music. I'm like I ran and I started just running to wherever I heard that music and I happened upon this school where the whole community was gathered and they were making sausages, cause that's what you eat in Switzerland right, so they love it, but they had sausages and salads and desserts and stuff and they had live music.

Speaker 1: 18:24

They had. I had just missed the band. The band was closing up and then there was another guy just playing all this music and all of the locals just sitting in tables and sharing each other's company, the food, all of that stuff, and it was just super fun and I just happened upon it.

Speaker 1: 18:39

And that's because I was just like I'm just going to go on a walk and just see where I go. I didn't have a set agenda. That was a highlight of you know. And then Rory finally joined me. He was like, hey, I sent him a picture of the sausages and he's like all right, where is this? That's just an example of exactly what you were just saying. Like let's just go get some fun, yeah, what a jewel.

Speaker 1: 19:01

Super fun. So when you are planning an itinerary, if you want to go with a group or you want group travel as part of your itinerary, you may or may not have a say in planning that part. So how would you like pick the right tour group?

Speaker 4: 19:17

Well, there's I mean there's different types of tours. There's traveling solo and then picking up day tours. Frankly, this is why guidebooks are such gold. A lot of people use Get my Guide or Viator or other big multinational companies nowadays to find tours and they pay a lot more than they have to, whereas Promer Guides and Photers and Lonely Planet and all of them we all list local tour companies and we give you the way to contact them directly so you're not paying for a commission to a third-party site.

Speaker 4: 20:02

If you want to do a group tour, where you are with a group of people for several days, they plan where you're going to stay, they take you from place to place. I mean it's very social, a very organized type of vacation. So not solo travel vacation, so not solo travel. I find there are a couple of marketplace sites that are very good for finding those types of tours. One is named tourradarcom. I'm blanking on the name of the other one, but what you do is you go to Tour Radar and oh well, I can get you the name and you can put it in your notes. You go to the site, you put in when you can travel, how long you want to travel for and where specifically you want to go.

Speaker 4: 20:59

Say, you decide you want to take a group tour to the Amalfi Coast of Italy and you have a week. You put that in, you put in your rough dates and then these sites shoot back 30, 40 options. One is $500 a day because you're staying only in the very finest hotels, you're eating incredibly well, you're going around with an actual archaeologist or art historian Actually that could be $1,000 a day. $500 a day is not, sadly, not that much anymore, or so that's number one. Number two tour you're paying a third less and you notice in the details oh wait, we're going to the same hotels and we're going to the same restaurants and it looks like a real expert is guiding this. But it's cheaper because it's a locally owned company. It's not a big multinational company.

Speaker 4: 22:02

So that's number two. And number three could be one that's a fraction of the cost because you're staying in hostels and you're using public transportation to get from point A to point B. Or you might find another Amalfi tour that's on bicycles or that's hiking from town to town and you can see very quickly how much you should be paying for a group tour, which is something that's very opaque. You know group tours are not sold by Expedia, Orbitz, travelocity and the like. They're hard to compare apples to apples except on these new sites, and there are user reviews so you can see what people who have taken these tours in the past have to say about the tours in question. So I think these sites are really really good resources for the folks who want to take guided tours.

Speaker 3: 22:57

Yeah that's great Great advice.

Speaker 1: 22:59

I know previously we've featured tours by locals. We have not yet talked about experiences on Airbnb, but when you go to Airbnb you can also find like what they're calling experiences, which are these kind of tour type things. Have you run across any of those? Or or had yeah?

Speaker 4: 23:18

I've actually done them. I've had some good, good experiences. I did something a little dangerous when I was traveling with my 16-year-old. We were in Paris and we took a shopping tour with a Parisian fashion expert. I was worried that I was going to lose my shirt, that it would be very expensive, but she took us to consignment stores so it didn't end up being that expensive. But she was brutally honest, as the French often are, about our figure flaws. I learned that each shaped figure, which means my shoulders and my hips, are the same width, but I have no waist, and so the whole tour was about how to pretend I have a waist.

Speaker 1: 24:11

And sorry it cut out when you said that your body type no it's called H.

Speaker 4: 24:17

It's the letter H. I have an H-shaped body.

Speaker 1: 24:21

Okay, okay.

Speaker 4: 24:22

There you go.

Speaker 3: 24:24

Well, and even with a French accent, it probably didn't sound very nice.

Speaker 4: 24:28

No, it's all right, it sounded better.

Speaker 1: 24:31

I don't know.

Speaker 3: 24:33

Sometimes, if you say it with the right accent, it makes it better.

Speaker 1: 24:36

Yeah, they have like this.

Speaker 4: 24:39

They don't use processed foods, so that helps.

Speaker 3: 24:42

Yes, big time Speaking of processed food, I've found that, uh, for example, in finland and switzerland these two countries in particular my body does better.

Speaker 1: 24:50

it's really strange with the foods I come to finland and eat chocolate and then I lose weight.

Speaker 4: 24:56

I don't know what it is that's amazing yeah, no, it's all about processed foods. It's great there can be experiences. Sometimes they can be terrific, sometimes they can be, eh, the same with Get your Guide. The same with all of them. So you need to read the reviews and figure it out.

Speaker 3: 25:19

Yeah, you'd mentioned public transportation, and I've had some amazing experiences with that, from Jamaica to Egypt to oh gosh Finland. In Jamaica, I took from Kingston to Montego Bay a local bus. It took hours and it was just like a movie. I was crammed with all locals. I mean, we're like this, sweating there's no ACs middle of summer, sweating and falling asleep all over each other. There were chickens inside the bus with us and the roof was piled higher than you can imagine. A rainstorm came just as we were coming through the mountains and bowlers that could have knocked wheels off the bus were coming down, and it was like what an amazing experience, though, to be with the locals and all that and see well, this is what their life is really like in public transit. It was a really cool opportunity. I thought Not for everyone.

Speaker 4: 26:14

Sure, actually there's a great experience in Jamaica. Anybody who's going to Jamaica should do the Meet the I think it's called the Meet the Locals program. It's run by the Jamaican Tourist Board. It's absolutely free. You tell them what you're interested in and they hook you up with a local who then shows you it. So you know, sometimes if you're if you want to see a Jamaican church, you can go to a service with a local.

Speaker 4: 26:45

I love to cook, so I went into a woman's kitchen and she taught me how to make aki, which is this odd fruit. It looks just like a tiny brain, it's white and it looks just like a little brain, but when you cook it up it tastes like the creamiest eggs you've ever had. It's savory and it was absolutely delicious. And it was absolutely free to go into this woman's home. We made the dish together, her whole family joined and we had this wonderful program in Jamaica.

Speaker 4: 27:23

Around the world there's similar things. They're called greeters tours. Have you ever done those? They're free tours that you can do in New York City Big Apple greeters. You can do them in Japan, I think it's called Tokyo greeters and Kyoto greeters in Korea, in many, many different destinations. Just Google greeters tours and the destination, and these are tours where proud locals show you their communities.

Speaker 4: 27:58

I write the Frommer's New York City Guide, so I did a greeter tour there, in a very Hispanic area of the Bronx, and it was absolutely fascinating. And I've lived in New York City my whole life. But I was going into stores where candles that grant you different wishes were being sold and I was invited into homes and I went into a Catholic church in the area and I learned what it's like to be a recent immigrant living in the Bronx and it showed me a whole nother side of my hometown. That was spectacular, fascinating. Yeah, now, I asked for that in particular. Often these greeters will also take you to the major tourist sites. The Japan greeters are very helpful. If you do it your first day in Japan, they'll show you how to use the subways. They'll show you how to get around the fact that restaurants tend to be on the 10th floor, not on the ground floor. They'll explain to you things that will make the rest of your journey much better and it's all free.

Speaker 1: 29:13

Wow, that is amazing. I know when we we had a week in Finland before we we go to a camp that we teach, and that week we have friends there. So I was really reaching out to, okay, remind me of the app we use for the subway, and you know, I was asking, like things like you're talking about, that these tour guys were providing I have friends in Finland, but I don't have friends in Tokyo. I don't have friends in Japan who are just going to say, oh yeah, remember, the bathrooms are like this, the restaurants are like whatever. You know, that type of stuff is really that's great.

Speaker 4: 29:49

Very helpful.

Speaker 1: 29:52

I love that. Now, with the greeters, for example, if it's free, are they expecting a tip and if so, what would maybe be a typical priority?

Speaker 4: 30:01

They are not expecting a tip typical priority. They are not expecting a tip. These are people who just love their country and want to share it with others and just love meeting tourists. However, you are expected to pay for their transportation and if you have a meal, you're expected to buy their meal. But no, no, no, they don't want a tip. These are not professionals. These are just civic-minded people who are really proud of their culture and want to share it.

Speaker 3: 30:28

Isn't that awesome. That feels like it's something that was lost to the past, but I love to hear that.

Speaker 4: 30:35

Yeah, you can do it in New York City. I have friends who are greeters. It's a great organization.

Speaker 1: 30:43

We'll definitely include that in the show notes. Speaking of New York, since you're an expert and you want to give us, like I don't know, your top three tips, well, things have changed drastically in New York City.

Speaker 4: 30:55

Just in the last year, a new rule went into effect, basically wiping out Airbnb, so you can no longer stay in Airbnbs in New York City and at the same time, because we are a sanctuary city, anybody who asks the government for housing in New York by law has to get it. And so we had Florida and Texas and a whole bunch of people shipping us bus loads and plane loads of migrants. And so our mayor, eric Adams, has contracted with what used to be the cheap hotels in New York, and those are filled with migrants now. And I'm all for it. I want to give people places to stay. That's fine.

Speaker 4: 31:45

But as a travel writer covering New York, it's most that the hotels in New York are outrageously expensive now. Wow, that's true, but in the off season. So if you want to visit New York, come in January, february or March, when you can get a really nice room for about $119 a night. If you come in December or November, that same room will cost you $519 a night. So for the first time in writing this book, I had to add in New Jersey hotels. So in Frommer's New York City you will find hotels in New Jersey where you can get into the city very easily on public transportation. I only included places that are easy to access, but that was kind of heartbreaking, so it's been the perfect storm for New York. It's gotten very expensive for hotels, so that's tip number one. That was a very long tip, apologies.

Speaker 1: 32:50

I had a similar experience in California. A travel company was supposed to book us a hotel and then they couldn't because they were earmarked for things.

Speaker 4: 32:58

So yeah, it's gotten very tough. Yeah, no, it's gotten very tough. Tip number two is you're often told that you have to pay top dollar to see a Broadway show. The truth is, there are always Broadway shows that are discounting. They just don't fill up. They never all fill up and so, unless you really want to see a very, very popular one, you can definitely see a Broadway show for half the cost.

Speaker 4: 33:37

There's a really good app called Today Tix that I like. Where you can and it's not just for day of shows you can get the tickets weeks in advance for 50% off. There's also the TKTS booth in Times Square and also up near Lincoln Center, so you rarely have to pay full price for a Broadway show. In fact, so many opened in the last year. And because business travel is down to New York, as it is to everywhere, and this Broadway shows used to be something business travelers did a lot, I've been seeing Broadway shows for about $57, which is harmless, and you used to pre-pandemic, you used to pay. So Broadway shows have gotten pretty affordable.

Speaker 4: 34:20

And I guess the third tip is also an entertainment tip, because New York City is the center of media and is the center of the industry that makes opinions across the United States and across the world. Every night of the week you can see a free talk by really great people. You can see a free talk by really great people, whether it's an author with a new book, whether it's a politician trying to sell an idea, whether it's a scientist who wants to also get his ideas out. There are incredible events that are absolutely free, happening every night of the week, and when you go to them, you meet wonderful, engaged, interesting New Yorkers, because these are things that tourists don't tend to do Super cool.

Speaker 1: 35:15

Attending lectures is a great thing.

Speaker 3: 35:17

Yeah, how fun. Yeah, oh, it's great. But how do you find where these are happening in New York? I mean, if I've got a night free and I'm thinking I'd be really cool to hear somebody talk about whatever. Or here's one of my favorite authors about a book.

Speaker 4: 35:30

Yeah, there are. I list several websites in my book Informer's New York City. Let me think if I can remember the names of them offhand. Well, time Out, new York often has good event listings. The New York Times site has good event listings. One of my favorite is if you follow Thirsty Gallerina on Instagram, she will tell you where the openings are happening at the galleries of New York City. And New York City has more art galleries than any other city on the planet, and so there are always openings, and at these openings they're giving out free wine. So you can go, you see the art, you go in for free, you get a nice glass of wine and you can see what's de rigueur, what's of the moment in the art world. It's really fun.

Speaker 3: 36:26

That is super fun. Nice, we'll also, as we said earlier, put a link to your website so that they can find these things on your site, I'm sure as well.

Speaker 4: 36:33

Fabulous yes, or in Fromer's New York City. My book how many more? 2025 is coming out in October. Oh, it's glossy, okay, so you update the guides every year. I update new york city every year. She's my muse. Um. I've spent a couple of weeks um taking disco naps in the late afternoon so I can stay out till three or four in the morning. Uh, just nightlife, um, but lately people are surprised to see me. I'm not as young as I used to be, but this is a city, as you know, that doesn't sleep, and so there's amazing things going on every hour of the day.

Speaker 1: 37:13

Yeah, wonderful man, all right. Well, that is your home, that's your home, turf. Recently you went to Azores. Tell us about that.

Speaker 4: 37:23

Yeah, I was invited by the Century Club, which is a club for people who have been to 100 or more countries, to speak at their event, and it was in the Azores. The Azores are a group of volcanic islands off the coast of Portugal that actually have a happy colonial story. You usually don't hear happy colonial stories, but they were uninhabited when they were discovered and so Portuguese folks moved there, created these cities, and they weren't displacing anyone. They're incredibly lush, incredibly green. On some of the islands you see these exquisite Baroque churches. They're places where you can drop a seed and it just shoots up a tree because of these places it's volcanic dirt, so they're so fertile. And these were the islands where, during the great age of exploration, this is where the explorers would stop and bring on supplies, and so a lot of really interesting history that way.

Speaker 4: 38:42

And these are islands that love the United States because in the late 1950s on the main island there was a terrible earthquake, because these are volcanic islands that destroyed many of the cities and John F Kennedy was then a young senator who somehow they got through to him and he created a special bill allowing folks from the Azores whose homes had been destroyed to emigrate legally to the United States. And so nowadays, bizarrely enough, there are I think it's 1.5 million Azoreans in the United States, but only 500,000 in the Azores. Wow, and you say you're from the United States. They will have cousins, they want to know if you know Right, and so you get this wonderful, warm welcome because they're so tied to the US.

Speaker 4: 39:47

So really, really interesting melding of influences. You know great Portuguese food, these incredibly fertile islands, where they have some interesting culinary traditions. For example, they bury food in a volcanic vent and the thermodynamical heat cooks the food and then you unwrap it and you eat it and it's fascinating, wow, really, really interesting part of the world to go to. And, like Portugal, portugal is one of the least expensive countries in Europe to go to, and that also has to do with the Azores as well, so costs are slightly lower there than they probably are in Switzerland, most everywhere.

Speaker 1: 40:36

We're hoping we will hit Portugal this coming spring. So we are in the works with that. So, hopefully, because we haven't yet been to Portugal and we definitely have never been to the East.

Speaker 4: 40:48

Portugal. You know, before you go, be sure to read about the recent history, because for 15 years until I think it was 82 or so they had one of the worst dictators on the planet. They had one of the worst dictators on the planet, and so because of that man in fact JK Row did so you don't see skyscrapers anywhere and during his time in office they were in such bad condition that, like, the infant mortality rate in Portugal was worse than it was in sub-Saharan Africa during the time of Salazar. And so you visited today and you meet a people who are so optimistic. They've come through the worst thing ever and now it's a society that's just thriving, and if you know about the history, seeing how well they're doing is just heartwarming.

Speaker 3: 42:03

Wow, that's so neat.

Speaker 1: 42:04

Yeah, they figured they can go up from where they've been. It's all up there, it's all up from there, all up from there.

Speaker 4: 42:11

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a country that shows you the power of resilience.

Speaker 3: 42:17

Oh, that's great to know.

Speaker 1: 42:18

I love that. Well, if we want to visit Portugal or New York City, what are some great websites that we need to visit for, like booking airfares and hotels and things like that?

Speaker 4: 42:31

Well, every year we hire a guy named Reed Bramblitt. He's an amazing researcher and he spends weeks just doing search after search after search to find out which search engines work best For airfares. He found that a brother-sister pair of websites. They're owned by the same company. They have exactly the same results. Their names are Kayak and Momondo. They consistently found the lowest rates, except for last-minute tickets. For last-minute tickets, for some reason CheapTicketscom found the best last-minute rates. But for all other types of travel, he found Kayak and Momondo just slayed the competition. And that includes Google Flights. He found Kayak and Momondo just slayed the competition, and that includes Google Flights. Google Flights, in our searches, found the lowest prices exactly 0% of the time.

Speaker 3: 43:35

Wow.

Speaker 4: 43:35

Yeah, they were the fastest, they were lightning fast, but they didn't do as well as Kayak and Momondo. And the nice thing about Kayak and Momondo is they also have these filters which allow you to filter for Wi-Fi on board the flight, or filter for type of airplane, or filter if you only want business class seats, or filter if you only want to book directly with the airline, which is a good thing to do nowadays, because there's been a lot of meltdowns, as we were discussing earlier, and those who book directly with the airline get help first. If you have to be reaching out to a third party, that slows you down and other people get the seats on the next plane and faster than you do. So I recommend these sites for searching, but not necessarily for booking. Yeah, so that is for airfares, and you can read our whole article by Reed Bramblitt on fromerscom. Okay, or hotels we had a tie Google actually came up on top for hotel rates and it tied with hotelscombinedcom, so those were the best for the websites that publicly show hotel rates. However, because every hotel on the planet right now has contracts with Orbit, expedia, travelocity, priceline, bookingcom and the like, and in those contracts there's always a clause that they will not give deeper discounts than they show on those sites.

Speaker 4: 45:27

Because of that, I find that certain travel clubs can get you better hotel rates. They include Travel and Leisure Club. The famous magazine now has a travel club, now has a travel club. If you're a lawyer, if you're a doctor, if you're a welder, your professional organization probably has a travel club and those places can get you better prices. There's a club that's on Instagram that's called At Hotel the at sign and then hotel and you go there. You have to send them a direct message through Instagram telling them where you want to go, your travel window, and then they'll shoot back the secret discounts Because these hotels under the rubric of these clubs can't be Googled, because their prices can't be Googled.

Speaker 4: 46:26

I've found that the prices can often be as much as 25% to 50% lower than you're assigned on the publicly available sites. But that has to offset the cost of joining these clubs the annual fee. The one exception to that is the Instagram club. At hotel. There's no fee to join, so that's the one I tend to use. It's a bit clunky. They don't show you all the information you need. For example, I was looking at Acadia National Park hotels near the border to that park. During high season Prices were outrageous. I found a price that I didn't find anywhere else on ad hotels. What they didn't tell me was it was only for rooms with bathrooms down the hall. Careful with that one.

Speaker 1: 47:17

Yeah.

Speaker 4: 47:17

I have to be careful with that.

Speaker 1: 47:18

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3: 47:19

I mean, it's not the worst thing in the world, but no, you know right.

Speaker 1: 47:24

But not ideal. Yeah, I mean in our opinion, the worst thing in the world, but you know Right, but not ideal. Yeah, I mean in our opinion, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4: 47:30

No, I'm not a big fan of sharing a bathroom anymore.

Speaker 3: 47:32

Yeah exactly Anymore. That's exactly. Yes, you said it.

Speaker 4: 47:36

I did hostels for decades, but I don't know, I'm getting lazy, I guess, or maybe I just have to go to the bathroom more often in the middle of the night.

Speaker 3: 47:43

Yeah, it is, but I told her the same thing, oh gosh, a couple of years ago. Yeah, you know what? I think I'm over that. Let's move up a step.

Speaker 1: 47:56

Up-road hotels, things like that, yeah yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4: 47:58

You know, I've got to say a lot of hostels now have gotten very glam and some of them have beautiful private rooms that are less expensive. So don't write off hostels altogether.

Speaker 3: 48:10

No, absolutely Last year in Denmark. Was it last year in Denmark or the year before? We stayed at a hostel downtown.

Speaker 1: 48:17

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3: 48:19

And it was wonderful, really wonderful. The breakfast was great. It was families staying there and everything Private bath.

Speaker 1: 48:28

We also got to perform there, so that was fun. Yeah, that's great, yeah, ok, well, thank you for being on our podcast, but you have your. You have your own podcast on Fromers, so tell us a little bit about how frequent you post and the type of content and things like that about your podcast.

Speaker 4: 48:46

The podcast is posted usually Sundays at 8 am in the morning, eastern time, pretty much every Sunday, although every once in a while I'll take a day off. I was on radio for 20 years and unfortunately, radio is all politics now, so I lost my radio show slot. At the height of the pandemic. I was replaced by a left-right show starring Rudy Giuliani and Anthony Weiner, so I've got the podcast now. The New York Times called it one of the 13 best for travel. You can get it on yeah, you can get it wherever podcasts are heard.

Speaker 4: 49:29

It's called the From Rich Travel Show.

Speaker 1: 49:31

Okay, from Rich Travel Show. So we'll get that on our show notes as well, and thank you so much. I know we have like 50,000 other things we could talk with you about and ask you about, but we really appreciate your time and we're just excited to share your information with our listeners.

Speaker 3: 49:48

Yeah, totally.

Speaker 4: 49:50

And tell your listeners I usually look a little better, but it's a huge loss.

Speaker 3: 49:55

I don't know if your camera shows that I haven't shaved in a couple days.

Speaker 4: 50:00

All right, thanks again, all right.

Speaker 1: 50:02

Thank you. We hope we've inspired you this episode so join us next time. Please subscribe to rate and share our podcast with your friends or you know whomever. And please like and follow us on Instagram, youtube and Facebook.

Speaker 2: 50:17

We are also on X and on all social platforms. We are at TheROAMies, that's T-H-E-R-O-A-M-I-E-S, and our main hub is our website.

Speaker 1: 50:29

ww<br> www. theroamiescom, that's right. That at www. TheROAMies. com. That's right, that's T-H-E-R-O-A-M-I-E-Scom. We'll be there until next time. Yeah, thanks for listening c. www. transcript.